Data center administrators face a challenging task to fulfill the data requirements of a datacenter, while also maintaining acceptable power, hardware, and space requirements. Often, in order to minimize expenditures, administrators increase the application density of servers within a datacenter. Application density is a measure of the number of applications executing on a single physical computer. By increasing the number of applications running on each physical computer, the number of servers required to support data center operations may be minimized.
In order to increase application density within a datacenter, administrators may also utilize virtual machines (VMs). Virtual machines can increase application density by enabling the sharing of a machine's physical resources by multiple virtual machines. For various reasons, however, it is not always possible to execute two different applications within the same VM. For instance, it may be undesirable for two different applications to execute within the same VM due to security concerns. As another example, two different applications executing on the same VM might conflict when attempting to access the same resource.
In order to enable two potentially conflicting applications to execute on the same computer, it might be necessary to execute an individual VM for each application. However, it can be costly to execute multiple VMs in this manner due to the licensing costs associated with executing each virtual machine. In addition, performance cost for executing multiple VMs can be significant when operating in an environment containing a large number of machines, for example, operating in a cloud environment. Within a data center each VM is typically monitored and managed. Accordingly, the management cost for operating a data center increases with the addition of VMs because each VM may require various patches or policies in order to operate in a desired fashion.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.